“Don’t open it yet.”
“Why?”
“Because we haven’t decided on the roles. It wouldn’t be fair to confirm who lost right off the bat, yes?”
Kunikida spoke with confidence, not even giving a hint that this was all part of his plan.
“That makes sense. I guess we should all open them together at the end.” Dazai gripped the slip of paper in his hand. “More importantly, Kunikida, I just had the perfect idea for the entrance exam.” He still had the slip held tight.
“And what’s that?” Kunikida swiped the envelope out of Dazai’s hands, then mixed up the contents before drawing a slip for himself.
“Well, you know that bomb I just happened to receive? I brought it with me.”
Dazai pointed at the paper bag with the fake bomb he’d showed them at the café. Some woman had apparently sent it to the pub for him as a gift, but it almost escalated into a bomb scare.
“It’d be a waste if we didn’t use it.”
“You want to use a bomb?” Kunikida craned his neck. Yosano observed their exchange out of the corner of her eye and drew a slip of paper as well.
“Of course. A bomber will suddenly appear at the detective agency, barricading themselves inside while taking a civilian hostage. We would be able to see how the rookie handles such a risky situation. Obviously, the president will make the final call, but if he can disarm the bomb or persuade the bomber to give up, then the kid passes. What do you say? Sounds like a very detectivelike case if you ask me.”
Kenji drew a slip of paper from the envelope. Usually, Ranpo would go next, but he wasn’t going to be there on the day of the test, so he was relieved from this responsibility. The last person to draw from the envelope…was Tanizaki.
“Here you go, dear brother.” Naomi held out the envelope to him.
Everything was going according to plan so far. It was smooth sailing from here on out. A simple drawing was all that was left.
“So whoever draws the smallest number…plays the bomber,” said Tanizaki.
“Right you are,” Dazai casually replied.
Tanizaki sneaked a look at Kunikida, who subtly nodded back at him so faintly it could hardly even be seen. Tanizaki was already in this deep, so he felt he might as well let it play out until the end. He drew a slip of paper.
Kunikida’s scheme was extremely simple.
Fake slips of paper.
The pile Dazai drew from was not the same as the one everyone else drew from.
Of course, this was only possible because they had prepared multiple copies of the old newspaper and tinkered with the envelope. As one might expect from someone who had worked with Dazai for so long, Kunikida was able to predict that the roles for the entrance exam would inevitably be decided through drawing lots and that the point of compromise would be using an old newspaper to make the slips of paper to prevent cheating.
If they were unable to use the old newspaper or envelope, Kunikida had claimed, then that was that. His skill, The Matchless Poet, and Tanizaki’s Light Snow would be powerless before Dazai’s No Longer Human, since it could nullify any skill simply by Dazai touching them. Their only choice would be to prepare for the worst and pray to the god of chance to make the right decision.
But everything went well this time. Just as planned, Dazai drew from the dummy pile.
First, Tanizaki’s job was to get eleven old newspapers the day before, then make numerous folded slips of paper with the same page number and dates. Which is why yesterday, he asked an acquaintance who recycled old newspapers to bring him multiple copies of an old paper with the same date. He used these newspapers to create slips of paper with numbered pairs starting from “1” and “2” all the way to “39” and “40” (page numbers were printed on both sides of the paper as mentioned above, so each slip of paper had one number on each side of it).
Next, his job was to collect all pairs of “1” and “2,” along with pairs of “3” and “4,” before putting them into a small envelope. It was ten newspapers’ worth of “1 & 2” pairs and “3 & 4” pairs, thus coming to a total of twenty strips of folded paper. In short, this was a fake pile of lots, twenty strips of paper, to replace the original pile of everything from pairs “1 & 2” to pairs “39 & 40.”
The plan was to force Dazai to draw from this pile, giving him only the chance to get a number from “1” to “4.” Whoever got the smallest number would lose, which meant Dazai’s loss had already been decided. In other words, he was going to get the role of the bomber. After that, Tanizaki would only have to switch piles again before everyone else drew a lot. There were nineteen slips of paper in the other pile, which started from the pair “5 & 6” and went all the way to “39 & 40.” Any number would end up being higher than what Dazai drew.
The piles needed to be switched out only twice. As long as that was done, then the rest of the scheme was extremely simple and extremely hard to discover—cheating with a high chance of success. That was why meticulous training was necessary for switching out the piles. That was where Naomi and Kunikida would come in. In the conference room, Tanizaki would pretend to mix the pile of twenty strips of paper, but he’d actually switch them out with the “1 & 2” and “3 & 4” pairs. After Dazai drew a slip, Kunikida would then switch out the pile to the “5 & 6” through “39 & 40” pairs when he had his turn.
Nonetheless, the envelope itself was prepared with a false bottom before the meeting, so switching out the pile itself wouldn’t be that difficult.
It was a rather simple mechanism. The false bottom with the fake pile had a string attached that would just need to be pulled to switch the piles. This was Kunikida’s ultimate weapon against Dazai that he had been laboriously preparing for well in advance.
All the traps had now been set.